The Badgers Still Care, and Recall Voices Will Be Heard, but Wisconsin Still Has to Get Out There and Vote

MILWAUKEE — The last time I talked with Gwen Moore, the congresswoman from Milwaukee who most assuredly don't take no mess, we'd just heard Michelle Obama give a speech in the Pabst Theater downtown in which the soon-to-be First Lady said that, for the first time in her life, she was proud of her country, a line that was perfectly banal and obvious in its meaning to everyone in the hall, but that soon became fodder in the wingnut precincts of Blogsylvania. Moore and I both saw this coming, and, if I recall correctly, we both predicted with great confidence all the screeching and poo-flinging that would ensue, and did.

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Since then, and since the state of Wisconsin erupted into god's own political volcano over the past couple of years, Moore has become something of a celebrity, at least as celebrity is reckoned in the green rooms of various cable-news outfits. She is blunt and funny and great on TV, and she is more than a little fearless; in May, as the House was attempting to replace the Violence Against Women Act with a useless simulcrum of the same bill, Moore told the story of how she'd been a victim of sexual assault, and pretty much told the assembled House Republicans to put their pale shadow of a bill where the sun don't shine. On Sunday, she was one of the leading speakers, along with Jesse Jackson, at a boisterous rally on North 72nd Street.

There have been very clearly defined layers in the campaign to rid Wisconsin of Governor Scott Walker. The original fire came from a ferocious backlash among the state's unionized working class and the professional classes, most notably public school teachers. At the same time as he was stripping the latter of their collective bargaining rights, Walker also was taking a meat ax to social programs, most notably BadgerCare, the state's health-care plan. Suddenly, low-income voters, especially the African American community in and around Milwaukee, became engaged, and a vigorous, if unwieldy, coalition was born. And, if Tom Barrett is going to win on Tuesday, he's going to need a huge turnout in the city of which he is presently mayor, which is where Gwen Moore comes in. For her constituents, and for so many others, this stopped being a brawl over labor rights a long time ago. Instead, for them, it turned into a fight over a general feeling of alienation and disenfranchisement. What little stake they felt they had in the government appeared to be on the verge of being snatched away.

"I think that a lot of the center of the action was in Madison, which is 80 miles from here, and now that it's time to actually get the vote out, we recognize that this is where the concentration of Democrats live, in Milwaukee," Moore syas. "There are a lot of people in Milwaukee who have had adverse impacts from Scott Walker. He's managed to mess over everyone in Milwaukee. We got folks on waiting lists for BadgerCare. He actually transferred wealth from middle-income people and poor people to wealthy people. All of us lost about $20,000 value in our homes here in Milwaukee because he took $25 million of the mortgage settlement to balance his budget.

"No matter what you look at — whether it's BadgerCare, or the mortgage settlement, or the loss of services from Planned Parenthood, you pay more now for your prescription drugs, efforts to destroy senior care — he has managed to have an adverse impact on the average Milwaukeean."

Compared to how odd and airless the campaign has become elsewhere, there was a real charge on Sunday night in Destiny Plaza, an old moviehouse on the city's far north side that has been converted into a charter high school. Even though the hall was only a little more than half-filled, it was plain that, somehow, the stakes in this election for the people gathered here, a motley mix of neighborhood activists and union members, had become higher and more mortal. They seemed to be playing for something much greater than simply winning or losing an election, or defenestrating an unpopular governor. They appeared to be desperate to reassert their simple rights as citizens to be heard.

Jesse Jackson, of course, played on this like a grand piano. He brought out all the old riffs. They were somebody, and they should keep hope alive, and, above all, they should vote. He got a call-and-response thing going with them as a kind of chorus to his remarks.

"I can vote."

(I can vote.)

"I shall vote."

(I shall vote.)

I must vote.

(I must vote.)

Jackson hammered that at them, over and over again. They had to vote because people had died so they could vote. They had to "keep faith with the martyrs." Ultimately, he told them, the simple act of voting had never been simple at all. Not long ago, teenagers could get shipped off to Vietnam without being able to vote. Not long ago, not only could black people not vote, but neither could "the poor white farmer, who couldn't afford the poll tax." Not that much longer before that, women couldn't vote. Defining moments come along, he told them, when you're not looking for them.

"Sooner or later," he told them, "the coach has to stop talking. The ball's in your court now. You can go out and vote on Tuesday. Most of you couldn't have been there in August of 1963 on the Mall in Washington, or marching from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, but God keeps giving us chances to change the world in our times. This is one of those times."

Because, at the end of the day, which is coming on Tuesday, that's all that's left. The marches and the occupations and the gathering of the signatures, it was all prologue to a couple of million individual decisions. Stay home or go out and vote. Everyone's equal when the curtains close.